Connectivity between electrical, optical, and electromechanical components (circuit packages, fuse panels, circuit boards, electromechanical devices, etc.) may be accomplished by way of a wiring harness. A wiring harness is a collection of one or more wires directed in a more-or-less parallel fashion. One example of a wiring harness is a bundle of parallel, separately insulated wires that couple an automobile dashboard with the control electronics for the automobile's engine. Another example are the long bundles of wires that couple an airplane cockpit to the wing assembly, engines, tail assembly, and landing gear. Wiring harness diagrams may reduce an otherwise confusing collection of wires to a readable map of components and connections. Wiring harnesses may be represented using Computer Aided Design (CAD) diagrams. CAD diagrams may include many physical details of wires, couplings, and components. The process of manually producing CAD diagrams to represent wiring harnesses, and wiring schemes in general, is labor intensive.
Symbol diagrams reduce the components of a system to symbols, e.g. abstract shapes possibly including texture. Connections and couplings are likewise represented in an abstract fashion. Current methods to produce symbol diagrams for wiring harnesses rely upon CAD diagrams as a source of input information. Thus, before a symbol diagram can be produced, the prerequisite CAD diagram must be produced. One alternative to relying upon CAD diagrams for input is to manually arrange the components and connections of the symbol diagram. This may prove time consuming. A need therefore exists for a non-manual manner of producing symbol diagrams for wiring harnesses and similar wiring schemes which does not rely upon input from CAD diagrams.